Global warming causing ALS and Alzheimer's in babies?

oes global warming causing ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis) and AD (Alzheimer's disease) in babies? According to the UK Guardian it does, and it's a crisis, baby!

During Covid, epidemiologists embarrassed themselves by making unsubstantiated predictions that were wildly inaccurate. Well, now there's such a thing as ‘climatological neuro­epidem­iol­ogy’, which is even worse. Using material from some new book claiming that this subject exists, the UK Guardian just published an article on it. It's a great opportunity to watch the birth of a brand new conspiracy theory. The author asks:

Are growing rates of anxiety, depression, ADHD, PTSD, Alzheimer's and motor neurone disease related to rising temperatures and other extreme environmental changes?

Any moderately scientifically literate person would reply “No. That's ridiculous. ” But the author is a warming activist and for him, global warming is so powerful it can cause Alzheimer's in babies (see below) and can even affect “babies in the womb.”

Thanks to global warming, babies reading textbooks on astrophysics could become a thing of the past (Credit: Justapedia).
Photo by Steve Jurvetson from Los Altos, USA - A Proper Space Book for Babies cc by 2.0; link

I put that ‘babies’ phrase in quotes because it may be the first time in history that this paper called them “babies” instead of “useless clumps of cells.” This is a welcome development.

But if there's one group of people who are immune from both global warming and Alzheimer's disease, it is babies in the womb. They are more protected from GW than the frozen baby raspberries I put on my cereal. The article talks about how exposing rats in utero to 40°C heat harms them. This cannot happen in real life. We only get that hot in heatstroke or severe fever. A 40°C fever is 1.1° C away from fatal brain damage.

The Guardian bases some of its claims on a paper by some psychologist named Yoko Nomura at CUNY who studied newborns during hurricane Sandy, a category 3 hurricane that hit New York in 2012. Nomura wrote:

Girls who were exposed to Sandy prenatally experienced a 20-fold increase in anxiety and a 30-fold increase in depression later in life compared with girls who were not exposed. Boys had 60-fold and 20-fold increased risks of ADHD and conduct disorder.^[1]

This is at least somewhat plausible, as stress can affect blood flow in the parent (good review here)^[2]. Nomura speculates that ADHD in males was driven by changes in the family environment in childhood, while prenatal stress induced depression in females. More work needs to be done to find out if these changes, which seem unexpectedly big for such a short-term event, are right. Nomura repeatedly calls it a climate disaster, but Sandy had nothing whatsoever to do with climate change. For sure it's not heat stress: in a hurricane, one feels the lower barometric pressure but it certainly doesn't get hotter. It was just a week of really bad weather.

No matter. The author wants it to be climate change, so that's what it is:

Thus, with continued burning of fossil fuels, whether through direct or indirect effects, comes more dementia. Researchers have already illustrated the manners in which dementia-related hospitalisations rise with temperature. Warmer weather worsens the symptoms of neurodegeneration as well.
. . .
You may have also noticed, for example, your own feelings of aggression on hotter days. You and everyone else—and animals, too. . . . US Postal Service workers experience roughly 5% more incidents of harassment and discrimination on days above 32C, relative to temperate days.

How might one discriminate against a mailman? Use UPS or DHL instead? Use insufficient postage? Misgender him? It's obvious that a hot day can make you irritable, but the claim that global warming causes dementia is unscientific rubbish.

The article goes on to say “extreme heat” does this and that, triggering inflammation in the mouse hippocampus and making connections between brain areas more randomized at higher temperatures. But bear in mind that for climate activists, “extreme heat” is not what scientists mean when they create a fusion reaction, or when they talk about a fever due to inflammation, but a synonym for global warming—an increase in the environment of one degree C. Conflating the two is simply dishonest.

Global warming causes ALS and Alzheimer's disease in babies?

The author cites another paper that speculates that blue-green algae causes ALS. This, the author says, also affects the children the most. But the craziest one is a paper ^[3] by one Lilian Calderón-Garcidueñas in Mexico, who claims that ozone causes Alzheimer's disease (AD) in children. Those of you who worked on AD need to look away now. Ozone is back!

The paper is paywalled, but based on other papers by these authors the idea is that AD starts in the brainstem. They claim that 99.5% of babies and young children have early signs of it, caused by PM2.5 particles and ozone in metropolitan Mexico City. In a Biomolecules paper ^[4] they claim that 4.7, 6, and 43% of patients age 11–20, 21–30, and 31–40 had neurofibrillary tangles (NFTs) at Braak Stage between 3 and 5 and 202 out of 203 patients, including an 11-month-old baby, had Aβ pathology. This is not possible. Braak Stage V is severe AD that is “incompatible with normal cognition”^[5]. Only a tiny percentage of AD cases, known as familial AD, ever occur before age 60.

What, you might ask, does this have to do with global warming? The reasoning seems to be that cars produce both PM2.5 and CO₂. That's like saying car accidents kill 16,000 people a year in Mexico, so they should be banned to prevent global warming. The Mexican authors say PM2.5 levels have decreased dramatically since 1989. It's still worth studying (and so is ApoE4, if the NIH ever decides to get back to funding actual science), but PM2.5 has no discernible connection to climate. As for their supposed correlation of cumulative PM2.5 with cumulative suicide: anything cumulative correlates with anything else that's cumulative. It's meaningless.

As for ozone, a series of papers in 2003 claimed that ozone was being produced in the body by neutrophils and caused cardiovascular disease by oxidizing cholesterol in athero­sclerotic plaques.^[6] This would have added to the growing list of toxic gases like nitric oxide, carbon monoxide, and hydrogen sulfide that are produced in cells. Ozone has such a short half-life in a cell that these studies were agonizingly difficult and it was written off as an artifact.

Because it reacts instantly with cholesterol, an ozone molecule from the air would be lucky to make it into the lung and would never reach the brain. To cause AD it would have to produce a long complicated chain of inflammatory responses, each of which would have to be demon­strat­ed by painstakingly difficult research. It's easier just to make the claim without evidence.

ALS normally begins around age 60. AD usually begins after age 65. The cause of both diseases is unknown. Some researchers suspect that alcohol and tobacco use during military service may contribute to ALS. If so, the solution is simple: stop those babies from taking up smoking and drinking, prevent them from joining the US Marines, and also make sure they don't get any tattoos, which could give them hepatitis.

AD also does not start in the brainstem. It starts in the transentorhinal cortex, locus coeruleus and entorhinal cortex. These brain areas are close to the nose, so there is speculation that if viruses traveled from the nose to the brain they could theoretically cause a problem. But it's just speculation. Somebody has to prove it, just as somebody will have to prove these stories about global warming. Want people to believe? Do the work.

To add to the conspiracy theory, the article throws in “brain-eating amoeba,” which the author says “could” spread as a result of the climate crisis. There's that magic word “could” again, which makes everything true.

What extreme heat?

The other question is: What extreme heat? How can something our best thermometers can barely measure do all this? The author assumes there is “extreme heat” and seamlessly equivocates between weather and climate. But warming did not cause Sandy. Warming does not cause hurricanes at all—if anything, it reduces them. The answer seems to be that climate alarmists saw how effective Covid hysteria was at inducing mass conformity, so now they're searching for a way to reduce GW to a public health problem. If they can convince people they've found one, it's game over.

People expect science to police itself. Neurologists must start repudiating these unscientific claims or they'll someday discover they're regarded as climatologists are today: as people who tie together strings of unsupported hypotheses, call the result an established fact, and demand money to fix the ‘problem.’ Or worse, as people who sat around and made no attempt to prevent their colleagues from wrecking industrial civilization.

Conspiracy theories are beliefs about causality spread by people who stand to benefit from them. Their defining characteristics are that conflicting evidence is not considered and contrary ideas are treated as heretical. A believer gains group acceptance and the right to bully others for their heresy. That's about as far from the scientific spirit as you can get.

Babies do not get Alzheimer's disease or ALS. The Guardian's claim that global warming could change a fundamental fact of biology is a classic example of a modern conspiracy theory. You might think it has no chance of being accepted, but the history of similar fake science theories, which have caused chaos in our society, says you'd be mistaken.

mar 28 2024, 7:20 am. updated mar 28 2024, 6:15 pm